Monthly Archives: July 2016

Postally speaking, the United Nations is an invention—an organization, not a nation or political entity. The fact that it issues its own postage stamps and maintains its own postal service is a concession to the trappings of sovereignty (real political entities control their own post) and a revenue grab (UN stamps can be sold to collectors and the United States has the expense of processing and delivering the United Nations Postal Ad

Most collectors put their stamps in stamp albums, and preprinted albums have existed since the very earliest days of our hobby. Scott began producing stamp albums in the United States in the 1860s, copying the first stamp album producers in Europe. The most unusual thing about stamp album producers is how concentrated the business is in just a few hands and how little the stamp album man

The high point of stamp journalism was in the 1930's. Scores of weekly and monthly philatelic periodicals existed, many of them only a few pages and many of the journals existing for only a few issues. The Great Depression put many people out of work and printing companies had tremendous excess capacity, so there were many people with time to write and publish and printing costs were cheap. WW II put many of the less significant publications out of business as rationing made printing more difficult and the war mea

Throughout the late nineteenth century Germany was as involved as any European power in the fight to carve up China for political and commercial advantage. The United States, Italy, Japan, Great Britain, and France also issued stamps for their sovereign city states on the Chinese mainland. These city states were land ceded by the Chinese government on long term leases to European governments. These leases were negotiated by the Chinese from a position

Turkey today is a country with only moderate influence in areas that most often make headlines in American newspapers. But until World War I Turkey was often an important player in the European theater. Turkey, through Byzantium, later named Constantinople, was at the heart of the Eastern Roman Empire, and though Rome itself was sacked in the fifth century and the western Roman Empire formally ended at th

Now is the time to begin your specialized collection of Olympic stamps. The popularity of this thematic flows in quadrennial cycles, usually peaking a few months before the games themselves. Olympic philately is one of the most interesting and long established of the topical philatelic areas with the first set being issued b

Every country has sub specialties that are avidly collected by internal collectors, but which foreign specialist collectors of those countries never really warm too. As an auctioneer you can see this in bidding patterns and where certain stamps eventually sell to. Ordinary Great Britain stamps in our auctions sell to Americans, Canadians, Britons and Europeans. Plate numbers and cancellations of GB are similarly collected worldwide. But specialized phosphors or graph

For stamp dealers coming of age in the 1960s the stamp world was replete with Europeans who had escaped from Hitler and Stalin. Most were Jews, though looking back through the less opaque lens of our time, I know several were political escapees and at least one was fortunate enough to get out or he would have worn a pink star before he was exterminated. In 1965, the average philatelic refugee was about fifty, so in the prime of his professional life. And there were scores of them on the American philatelic scene

The growth of Asian philately has undermined traditional thinking about where new collectors come from. The traditional model has been the evolutionary model - children (usually boys) introduced to the hobby and collecting in their youth become re enamored with stamps in middle to old age. This paradigm has described the traditional collecting arc in the United States and Europe and has caused considerable chagrin among philatelists about the future of our hobby when we see so few young collectors. The Asian model is quite different - few Chinese collected as children. Rather, as young adults and middle aged men they have come into the hobby in droves. The reasons for this might provide us with a way to promote philately to more mature people today.

Let's suppose most people had too much money and needed so badly to lose some of it that they offered courses in how to lose it. I can't speak of what they would teach when the course concerned non philatelic areas, but when the subject came to stamp collecting there is no doubt that the best way to lose money is to buy new issues. It's a method that is tried constantly by thousands of collectors and proves itself a winner (that is loser) every time.